Hi everyone,
A few days ago, I saw for the first time the Entity Framework. It's a framework that allow to preserve the independece between business layer and the data base technology. In the other words, you can relate across the VS designer an entity of your business model with an operation (store procedure), table, field, of function on the database model.
"Every business application has, explicitly or implicitly, a conceptual data model that describes the various elements of the problem domain, as well as each element's structure, the relationships between each element, their constraints, and so on.
Since currently most applications are written on top of relational databases, sooner or later they'll have to deal with the data represented in a relational form. Even if there was a higher-level conceptual model used during the design, that model is typically not directly "executable", so it needs to be translated into a relational form and applied to a logical database schema and to the application code.
While the relational model has been extremely effective in the last few decades, it's a model that targets a level of abstraction that is often not appropriate for modeling most business applications created using modern development environments." of http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa697427(VS.80).aspx
I recommend to take an around of msdn to look some features that it provides.
